Download PROGRAM NOTES By Steven Ledbetter JOHN RUTTER Requiem

PROGRAM NOTES
By Steven Ledbetter
JOHN RUTTER
Requiem
John Rutter was born in London on September 24, 1945. He composed the Requiem in 1985 in
memory of his father. The first complete performance took place in Dallas, Texas in October
1985 (four movements of the still incomplete work had previously been heard in California). The
text is drawn partly from the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead, in Latin, and also draws upon
English texts, particularly some used in the Anglican service. Duration is about 40 minutes.
John Rutter attended the Highgate School in London, where one of his classmates was
the future composer John Tavener. He proceeded to Clare College, Cambridge, where he studied
music and sang in the choir. Not long after graduating he was named Director of Music at Clare
College, a position he held from 1975 to 1979, raising the renown of the choir considerably. He
founded the Cambridge Singers in 1981, for which group he composed original works and made
masterful choral arrangements of a wide variety of music. He continues to conduct widely,
though he no longer composes commissioned works on deadline, because he suffered from
chronic fatigue syndrome for a number of years from the mid-1980s, and this made it impossible
for him to guarantee a timely completion.
Most of his work is choral, so elegantly crafted for the medium that he has become quite
probably the most frequently performed choral composer of the day. His style is eclectic,
drawing from the British choral tradition, French music of the early 20th century, light music and
even American Broadway styles.
In a video discussion of the Requiem (viewable on YouTube), he explains that he wrote
the work in memory of his father, who had died in 1983. “I wanted to remember him in music in
some way, and preferably in a way that he might have enjoyed and appreciated.” His father
enjoyed music, but had no musical training, so he chose to compose a piece aimed at the eager
non-specialist. “It was particularly important in this case to write something that could be
appreciated by people everywhere.” He was particularly inspired by the example of Gabriel
Fauré’s Requiem, a work he had always loved, the manuscript of which happened to turn up
about that time, so that he was able to study it at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris.
He was not interested in setting the full Requiem text with the grandiose passages
designed to generate terror at the fear of the Last Judgment (such as are found in the Berlioz and
Verdi settings), but rather to follow Fauré’s example by selecting passages from the liturgical
text that are quieter and more contemplative. Since that time, some composers have followed that
tradition in leaving out some of the liturgical Requiem text and also in adding one or more
passages, either in Latin or some other language, to personalize the meaning (for the composer)
of the text he is setting.
When planning his own work, Rutter decided to stay more closely to the Fauré model in
choosing specific passages to set and also adding other texts with the aim of producing a work
that could be performed in church (though not as a liturgical piece, since he did not set the entire
prescribed text of the Mass for the Dead) or in the concert hall, and one that would particularly
emphasize the theme of consolation of the bereaved.
Rutter’s Requiem has seven movements, of which the first and last employ the standard
“bookend” texts that open and close the liturgical Requiem. Within that frame he established an
arch pattern, movements of a similar character paired together for the second and sixth place,
where he placed Psalm settings, starting darkly with Psalm 130 (“Out of the deep”), with the
next-to-last movement as a setting of Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd,” probably the bestknow, best-loved, and most consoling text in the entire Psaltery. These he chose to set in English
using the version found in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer of the Anglican Church. Moving
inward again, movements 3 and 5 are personal prayers to Christ, the “Pie Jesu” (which Fauré had
taken from the text of the burial service, recited at the graveside, and moved into his Requiem,
the service performed in church) and the “Agnus Dei,” a prayer to Christ pleading for mercy.
And the central movement is a setting of the “Sanctus,” which celebrates the glory of God.
Stylistically, Rutter writes in a happy mélange of musical styles as mentioned above, and
in this case, they are supplemented by a few references to Gregorian chant melodies, which the
composer feels are the fundamental basis of Christian sacred music.
STEVEN PAULUS (b.1949)
Three Nativity Carols
Though he was born in New Jersey, Stephen Paulus moved with his family to Minnesota in early
childhood, and he remains a resident there, having attended the University of Minnesota, where
his principal teacher was Dominick Argento, one of the most successful American composers of
opera and vocal music of his generation—just as his student Stephen Paulus became in his. Quite
early Paulus was composer-in-residence at the Minnesota Orchestra, and he followed that with a
residency at the Atlanta Symphony when Robert Shaw was music director. Shaw immediately
began asking for choral works from this young composer who had proved himself so much at
home with the human voice and the choral ensemble.
The Three Nativity Carols employ 15th-century texts of carols, which Paulus has
composed afresh, not using any original or traditional tunes. Of these texts, “The Holly and the
Ivy” is the best known—but Stephen Paulus has long shown that he has the gift of finding
effective texts, often little known, and making them sing.
KIRKE MECHEM (b. 1925)
Seven Joys of Christmas.
A native of Kansas, Kirke Mechem grew up in a musical family, receiving his first lessons from
his mother, a professional pianist. After service in World War II, he enrolled at Stanford
University, with the intention of becoming a writer like his father. But he took a harmony course
from Stanford’s choral director, Harold Schmidt, and this turned him not only in the direction of
music, but specifically of choral music. He took his master’s degree at Harvard, studying there
with Walter Piston and Randall Thompson (another role model for a choral composer). He
studied for several years in Vienna, then returned to the Bay area, where he took a job teaching at
the San Francisco College for Women (later merged into the University of San Francisco). He
was assigned to conduct a group called the Chamber Singers, which, he learned during auditions
a week before the first rehearsal, consisted entirely of inexperienced freshmen, only one of
whom had ever sung in a chorus before.
Because he had so little time to prepare a new Christmas program to replace the one he
had to scrap because it was far too difficult for these students, he decided to compose a set of
pieces himself, aimed at young singers, involving polyphony but avoiding chromatic harmonies.
He selected seven carols from different countries that fit into a theme of joys of the season: Joy
of Love, of Bells, of Mary, of Children, the New Year, Dance, and Song, and he completed one
arrangement a day, so that all were ready for the first rehearsal.
This charming but unassuming score became one of Mechem’s most frequently
performed works, though he has gone on to write a large volume of choral works large and
small, four operas (a brilliant comic-opera treatment of Molière’s Tartuffe and a dramatic opera
devoted to the abolitionist John Brown), as well as symphonies and other orchestral works. But
he is known particularly as one of the best choral composers in the country, and this early
“emergency” composition shows why.